Quotes About Meditation

To each his own way of calming down.

Cigarettes are food for the soul

found that with less effort in meditation, I could relax into a quiet, aware state much more easily.

My experience of meditation was different from one day to the next, but a common thread emerged: the way I felt afterward. I began to experience a quiet satisfaction from my daily practice of quieting my mind.

The word that comes to mind is "equanimity." After meditating, I was better able to watch what happened around me without jumping into reactions.

There is a level accessed in meditation that is beyond the neuron. This level has many names; one we could use is infinite awareness.

suggest that the meditation and near-death experiences reported by many are glimpses into a higher reality—and by this I mean a reality more subtle than the one to which our nervous system usually has access. At those moments in our lives when the mind has been quieted, we may indeed go "beyond" our nervous system's usual capacities. Then the consciousness within us, freed from perceiving the machinations of the mind, is able to perceive its own expanded form.

Whether we write lyrics or craft legislation, sell homes or teach classes, design spaces or open franchises, prayer is a critical part of the creative process. Don't just brainstorm; praystorm.

To be able to create, we must be willing to learn how to quiet our minds, feel our emotions, and stay in the vacuum so the ideas can well up from our deepest place of knowing.

We shape clay into a pot, but it is emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. -TAO TE CHING

Silence is the room we create for the searching of God, where we hear His voice and follow.

In my own Examen, then, I praydream—prayerfully daydream. I concretely imagine how I might approach the next twenty-four hours if I were to be God's hands and feet and voice.

the Buddha may well have been the original psychoanalyst, or, at least, the first to use the mode of analytic inquiry that Freud was later to codify and develop.

Making one's life into a meditation is different from using meditation to escape from life.

The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.

meditation is not just about creating states of well-being; it is about destroying the belief in an inherently existent self.

After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen—it doesn't matter—open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.

Taking my cue from the progress of meditation, I have found that the first task of working through from a Buddhist perspective is to uncover how the spatial metaphor of self is being used defensively to keep key aspects of the person at bay.

Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construaction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world.

Many people, in both the East and the West, believe that shutting down the ego, and the thinking mind, is the ultimate purpose of meditation. The Dalai Lama, rather forcefully, always argues that this is a grave misunderstanding. Ego is at once our biggest obstacle and our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to mold it according to certain guiding principles. Intelligence is a key ally in this shaping process, something to be harnessed in the service of one's progress.

As the famous Zen master Dogen has said: To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be one with others.

The Second Noble Truth of the Buddha takes its cue from this experience. It is traditionally described as the truth of "the arising of dukkha," and its central tenet is that the cause of suffering is craving or thirst. The

It is a fundamental tenet of Buddhist thought that before emptiness of self can be realized, the self must be experienced fully, as it appears. It is the task of therapy, as well as of meditation, to return those split-off elements to a person's awareness—to make the person see that they are not, in fact, split-off elements at all, but essential aspects of his or her own being.

Many others do not make this transition so seamlessly: they become enamored of the observing self that beginning meditation empowers and use that capacity for self-observation as a way to avoid personal responsibility. They observe their own pain, but not their contribution to its making.